Hi Neil,

" I think the time has long passed since anyone should have to deal with tables and columns and joins and keys. It's just a barrier to understanding.

Any decent BI tool should be able to represent business models in terms that make sense to business people, then decompose their requests to whatever physical schema they target. Just because you don't have to write SQL does not mean that it isn't complicated to draw those lines between tables and try to make sense of it a la Access."

Just a comment....

I agree that it would be great to 'hide the complexity'...

What I am finding is this.

As we develop more and more complex models to do more and more complex things putting the Business Objects universe over the top is getting harder and harder itself. I am finding that 'hiding the complexity' is getting 'ever more complex'. And I feel there is little help on the way so far.

In models I've customised/developed over the last few years it is not unusual to have 30+ fact tables in version 1. And there are many fact to fact table joins, (subject of an earlier append). Also, there is usually a very large number of loops etc in the models. All this means the BO designer needs to spend quite a bit of time building the universe and the universe has become a pretty high maintenance piece of work.

We've done things to allow movement of metadata (business name/help

text) from PowerDesigner models to BO Universes, and also from database tables to BO Universes (via an XML dump of the table)....but even with these tools in place, we are finding it taking a long time to set up these universes..

I'm on the BO group and I'm told that so far, this is as good as it gets'....

Like I said, just a comment....

Best Regards

Peter Nolan

Data Warehousing Consultant

Mobile: +353 879 581 732

-----Original Message-----

From: owner-dwlist@datawarehousing.com

Sent: 04 September 2004 00:52

To: dwlist@datawarehousing.com

Subject: Re: dwlist: Dimensional Modelling Question

From: "Neil Raden" <nraden@hiredbrains.com>

Lew,

If you're using a tool with no abstraction layer (metadata) to shield users from the complexity of tables then, yes, it will look complicated to them.

Most BI tools today do this, but if they connect through Access or something like that, you're out of luck. If you'd like some suggestions on tools, contact me offline, I get too much flak from the vendors if I mention anyone here.

I think the time has long passed since anyone should have to deal with tables and columns and joins and keys. It's just a barrier to understanding.

Any decent BI tool should be able to represent business models in terms that make sense to business people, then decompose their requests to whatever physical schema they target. Just because you don't have to write SQL does not mean that it isn't complicated to draw those lines between tables and try to make sense of it a la Access.

-NR